Kingfisher

03/06/2011, by No comments yet

An essay I started a few years ago is in the current Bluestem online quarterly. “Kingfisher” stemmed from a sighting of  one on a morning walk in Costa Rica, where I now live.

It is interesting to me how essays evolve. That one started out as pure observation and a memory from my childhood. The piece sat in my Scrivener project titled Essays in Progress and there are quite a few in that file. I’d pull it out now and again and look at it.  I felt it lacked focus and really, taken on it own, it had no point. I have a lot of those kinds of pieces, too. Over time, though, it began to dawn on me that the sighting and the memory did have a point, and the essay grew from there.

I cannot imagine trying to crank creative essays out on a schedule or deadline. Mine seem to have a life of their own and their evolution is slow. Three, four or five drafts is not uncommon for me. And, even when I think they have a point or they are finished, editors do not always agree with me. So, I was very happy this one found a home.

I am in quite good company at Bluestem. The spring issue is full of wonderful poetry, fiction, and, of course, nonfiction.  Click here to see all the contributors.

 

Magical Realism, or Gabito Meets the Mexican Mafia

28/05/2011, by No comments yet

According to my dictionary, magical realism is a literary genre or style associated especially with Latin America that incorporates fantastic or mythical elements into otherwise realistic fiction.

After this week, I would venture to say this definition is largely a North American attempt to grasp events as they naturally occur in Latin American countries. Authors may simply be writing about actual events and readers refuse to  believe it isn’t a fantabulation.  In other words, it’s just what went down. Take for instance, the case of two accused Mexican drug dealers currently being held in Costa Rica.

It all started on October 10, 2010, when a light plane went down in a gully shortly after takeoff from a small airport in the seedy suburb of Pavas, just west of San José. When police and emergency teams arrived and accessed the plane, wedged next to a roaring river, they found 170 kilos of cocaine spilling out of the fuselage where baggage is normally stowed. They transported the pilot and passenger to the hospital where they were treated for their injuries. (I believe the pilot died, but haven’t followed that part of the story.)

The following day, two Mexican nationals named Martinez and Mendoza were arrested by the Fuerza Pública (police) in the northern border town of  Peñas Blancas. According to the daily La Nacion, they were riding all terrain vehicles, baggage in tow. The assumption was that they were attempting to flee across the border into Nicaragua. The two men were handcuffed and brought back to San José.

It appears Martinez and Mendoza are the owners of the airline Aerolíneas Turísticas de América with offices and hangars at the Tobías Bolaños International airport in Pavas, an airline that only six months ago was broke. So far, this is just another criminal story that could appear in any newspaper anywhere, especially here.

The San José court decided the two were a flight risk and placed them in preventive detention, something akin to being held without bail in the USA, although in Costa Rica there doesn’t have to be any indictment in the works. They were held in La Reforma, a maximum security prison that recently has had a rash of murders and one failed prison break, but that isn’t part of this story.

Then, on May 10, 2011, seven months after their detention, Judge Kattia Jiménez Fernández, of the Pavas Criminal Court, ordered the two Mexicans released and placed under house arrest. Her reasoning, the prosecution had failed to file charges against the two men.  This augment was advanced by one of  the defense lawyers with the last name of Villalobos Salazar, not to be confused, and this is easy to do, with their other defense attorney who has the last name Villalobos Zamora.

When local residents discovered a condominium in the tony neighborhood of La Sabana was the chosen pad for the two Mexicans, they organized protests. Several other locations were bandied about with the same results. In the meantime, newly appointed Vice Minister of Security, Celso Gamboa, presented the Pavas judge with a written reprimand for her decision. It failed to dissuade her. She was then threatened with a judicial investigation by the attorney general’s office. At this time it is unclear whether that will proceed or not, but if it does it is sure to be slow.

Then, replacement Pavas criminal court judge, Joaquín Hernández, removed Villalobos Salazar from the defense team. Apparently, in the course of things, a long-time police officer of the Fuerza Pública ––the same officials who bagged the two Mexicans in their flight from Costa Rica–– told the court that he had been under pressure by Villalobos to change his story.

Los Dos Villalobos have maintained their clients were not really fleeing Costa Rica the day after the plane crash in Pavas, but rather on their way to visit family in Mexico. One has to ask about the wisdom of traveling the full length of Central America on an ATV , but this was their story and they were sticking to it. By the end of last week the replacement judge in Pavas had rejected as truth that version of their travel itinerary.

But, there was a delay in ordering the men back into preventive detention. The police officer who accused Villalobos Salazar of coercing him to change his testimony had to be reappear in court to clarify exactly which Villalobos had approached him. It turned out to be Villalobos Zamora not  Villalobos Salazar, so the judge reinstated the one and fired the other.

The Mexicans remain in La Reforma’s maximum security unit with preventive detention orders until August 2011.

I only bring this story up to illustrate that while the literary device of magical realism, “.. an aesthetic style in which magical elements or illogical scenarios appear in an otherwise realistic or even ‘normal’ setting,” we can see that one only needs to report the facts to carry it off.  Gabriel Garcia Marquez might have said it best when he noted, “My most important problem was destroying the lines of demarcation that separates what seems real from what seems fantastic.” Or, in the vernacular, you cannot make this stuff up.

 

 

 

Mother’s Day Quotes (Repost)

07/05/2011, by No comments yet

Hello Mothers of the world.

I don’t know about Spain or Costa Rica or Australia or Japan, but in the United States it is Mother’s Day on Sunday. I am sending every mother I know, and love, a greeting and a few quotes about mothers which I thought were nice (I particularly liked Aristotle’s take on it).

Some of you may be new mothers, some of you may be old(er) mothers, and at least one of you may be an expectant mother. We are all tied by a common thread and so,

Happy Mother’s Day!

God could not be everywhere and therefore he made Mothers
~old Jewish Proverb~

My mother had a slender, small body, but a large heart – a heart so large that everybody’s joys found welcome in it, and hospitable accommodation.
~Mark Twain~

Making the decision to have a child is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.
~Elizabeth Stone~

Becoming a mother makes you the mother of all children. From now on each wounded, abandoned, frightened child is yours. You live in the suffering mothers of every race and creed and weep with them. You long to comfort all who are desolate.
~Charlotte Gray~

Mothers are fonder than fathers of their children because they are more certain they are their own.
~Aristotle~

The mother’s heart is the child’s schoolroom.
~Henry Ward Beecher~

You may have tangible wealth untold;/Caskets of jewels and coffers of gold./Richer than I you can never be -/I had a mother who read to me.
~Strickland Gillilan~

Mother is the name for God in the lips and hearts of little children.
~William Makepeace Thackeray~

A mother understands what a child does not say.
~Jewish Proverb~

An ounce of mother is worth a pound of clergy.
~Spanish Proverb~

~When a woman is twenty, a child deforms her; when she is thirty, he preserves her; and when forty, he makes her young again.~
Leon Blum

Some are kissing mothers and some are scolding mothers, but it is love just the same; and most mothers kiss and scold together.
~Pearl S. Buck~

And one added by my daughter’s mother-in-law:

Children hold their mother’s hand for a while, but her heart forever.
~Anonymous~

I hope all of you mothers do something nice for yourselves this weekend.

Blog contents copyright © 2005-Present SC Morgan. All rights reserved..

Thinking Plants and Thoughtful Gardeners

04/05/2011, by No comments yet

I’m no Michael Pollan, but I have read his books. And while I cannot speak in the depth he does about seeds, the nature of plants, and the West’s increased reliance on hybridized seeds, I can speak to my own experience.

I’ve had vegetable gardens in Costa Rica from time to time, but I’ve usually given up. One year I asked a gardener of ours to control the weeds in my plot for me. He sprayed it with gramasone, a herbicide so toxic it blisters the earth bare for about three years, making it look as though it had been napalmed. Other years rain has beaten the ground and washed away all the seeds before they had a chance to sprout, and, of course, there are the bugs. And, if none of those things get the plants, there is always the humidity and blistering sun. When I was successful we ate wonderful green beans, spinach, and chards.

Until this year I’ve been a dutiful western gardener who planted seeds in tidy rows, grouped by their own kind. I tend to be a fairly linear person anyway and, like a friend of mine, am forced to draw a curved line in the ground of any garden design I make least the yard looks like a series of lap pools.

This year we have been growing heritage vegetables in my new and covered garden plot (the beds are rectangular; I couldn’t help myself). The errant gramasone gardener is gone, replaced by a compost bin and hand tools, and the rain is no longer enemy number one. I am still fighting the urge to plant like kinds with like kinds and am now making the garden more varied. There are tomatoes planted with basil, chard planted with spinach and bok choy, and arugula planted everywhere. Caramelized pear, roasted pecan and arugula salad is pure heaven.

I have not had to use pesticides and have had only minimal invasions of bugs. I do use a natural pepper spray that seems to deter the little buggers. It makes me cough when I use it, so I can only imagine their little lungs when they encounter it. The jungle is vast and there are lots of other choices. Go there, you guys.

But the most interesting thing that has happened is in the compost bin. Because Costa Rica is not a country that uses hybridized seeds, although that may change with the new trade agreement with the USA. Once you buy a squash or a cucumber or a tomato, you own the seeds to those plants. If you compost, rather than fling your wet garbage into the trash, they tend to germinate in the bin, volunteering when the compost is spread on the garden or around trees and shrubs. We now have a squash plant around almost every fruit tree on the place.

While the the volunteers are not spectacularly productive, they make up for it in heartiness. Unlike the packaged hybrid zucchinis I planted in the past, none of these vines have wilted in direct sun or molded in the humidity. In fact, they are robust and produce at about the pace that two households can consume. We even have a butternut squash plant that suddenly appeared in the vegetable garden. As though it knew it took up too much space, it “planted” itself on the edge of a raised bed and spilled out onto the lawn where it has produced two spectacular fruits for us. Because the butternut was so considerate, it has become a favorite of mine and I tend it, making sure it has enough water and food. Michael Pollan writes about plants being smart. I think this butternut squash is genius.

Of Quipus and Libraries

14/04/2011, by 3 comments

I read a fascinating article the other day in my local English newspaper, The Tico Times. According to the story, for the past five years writer José León Sánchez, and philologist Ahiza Vega have been studying the regional written and spoken languages of several native tribes in Costa Rica during the colonial period. It was tough going. Then they stumbled upon the ‘Rosetta Stone,’ as Vega has called it.

Hidden away, deep in the archives of the US Library of Congress, is a book, ignored (we can only surmise) since the nineteenth century. On Indian Tribes and Languages of Costa Rica, written by U.S. researcher William Gabb in 1875, is not only a treatise on the tribes of Talamanca, but it may be the key to unlocking a mystery, because Gabb apparently asked a friend from Talamanca to translate his book––complete with a glossary––using a quipu.

Quipus (shown in the picture above, courtesy of The Tico Times), sometimes called talking knots, are recording devices the Inca and Aztec Indians used. They were made of spun Alpaca, llama, or cotton threads, and knots. The elaborate knots have been thought to be physical representations of numbers or history, no one knows for sure, because no one has been able to translate them before. According to the Tico Times article, “[quipus] require significant craftsmanship and skill, because each knot represents an idea. With many knots – or ideas – strung together, the resulting quipus were used to provide Inca emperors and other tribal leaders with vital information about the local population, water issues and military affairs.”

History shows that the Spanish destroyed the majority of Incan quipus because tribes used them to communicate with each other behind the conquistador’s backs. Now there are only a few left. Today only about 600 Inca quipus survive. Of those, only 15 or 20 were ever transcribed as Spanish documents, but no correlation has been found between a surviving quipu and a transcribed one.

Until now.

The hope is that with Gabb’s book, the translated quipu, and the glossary, now researchers might have a chance to crack the code and that the other 600 might be translated. What history will we discover? It will be interesting to see if they can do it, and, it will be interesting to see what the Incas had on their minds way back then.